Been Busy Working

Saturday, I started this post with this around 4 AM. Some noises woke me and I stayed up to around 5:30.

 Late last night, I finally found a movie that has been troubling me for decades. A werewolf I remember from my childhood that was not like The Wolfman, but from the same period; spooky more than blood-curdling. Thanks to Google and C.M. Rosens, I found it: The Undying Monster (Wikipedia). Mystery solved.

By the way, C.M. Rosens is an author of dark speculative fiction. Her website includes her interviews of other writers and links to her own works, as well as "Werewolf Films Series 1910-1979" on her Essays & Series page.

I listened to Irish Rebels and Poets until my insomnia subsided.

I worked on "Going After The Kid." That kept me busy after I got back to work around 8:30.

Tended to the email; after 10, I listened to Backwoods on WMBR. I went to the convenience store, but decided against going to CVS to pick up my meds. That will be the trip on Tuesday.

I submitted "Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow" to Bog Matter Magazine.

"No Ordinary Word" went to Gordon Square Review, and to the Toronto Journal.

The plan here are no submissions with a reading fee. I remain technically broke - too much for reading fees! It is hard to find something that pays without a reading fee. I spent a few hours following up on leads, so I can think that is a fair statement to make.

Some blog posts were written or added to. I now have something scheduled between now and the middle of September. I need to get more of the journal typed up. I would prefer to be carrying out fewer boxes of papers than with which I arrived.

I talked to KH for about an hour. No word back from T2 or MW about "Theresa Pressley". I have thought a lot about J's comments, but have been studious in refraining from implementing them - other things needs to be done right now.

Then I set myself to editing "Going for the Kid." I did not finish.

Today - 

I continued editing "Going for The Kid" before church,

Church quiets my mind. It also gave me a little epiphany for "No Ordinary Word" - and added a few words when I came back about passions entangling us.

Then I finished with "The Kid."

That was around 2:30. Last night, my sleep was marred by acute indigestion, and feeling tired now, I napped. That lasted until almost five.

Since then, I set about submitting "The Kid". I afflicted Penumbric, and Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 2. 

 I wrote KH an email asking if it was a coincidence or a good omen that two possible publishers for my latest dystopia - where Canada is the land of the free - are both Canadian.

However, I did pass on The Future Fire, because they want exclusive submissions. I cannot afford that.

It appears that Of Rust and Glass has gone the way of the Great White Buffalo.

Dinner time. 

Dinner has been over some hours ago. I do wish the pain in my stomach would stop.

While eating, I did some reading and drafted two possible posts.

After dinner, I started on my Commercial Clause notes that I worked up while in prison. They will start again on Tuesday morning.

I just finished reading The crash of 2026: a fiction (Crooked Timber). This I suggest to you as an eye-opening satire.

 I straightened out some of the mess in the boxes, and have my next two projects on the reading stand.

Now, for the email before bedtime.

Looking for possible publishers, I subscribed to Book XII: A Journal of Literary Philosophy, and got my first newsletter today. It was like manna from heaven - David Hume was the cover story, so to speak.

I just devoured Marianne Janack's I Was a Teenaged Humean (actually, I was a twenty-something Humean). A philosopher with a sense of humor has to be a Humean.

And then there was Hume.  Reading Hume was refreshing.  He was funny.  He viewed himself as a writer, not a scholar.  His philosophy just seemed like common sense.  He wasn’t afraid to point out bullshit and orthodoxy.  He had no truck with religious arguments.  True, the Meditations had gotten Descartes into trouble with the Catholic authorities, so he had some anti-orthodox bona fides, but his argument for the existence of God still seemed to be in the old medieval mold.  Descartes may have started the revolution, but he hadn’t gone far enough.

 But Hume.  Here was a version of skepticism as a way of conducting one’s search for knowledge, for thinking about everything, for questioning authority: skepticism not as a method, but as epistemic virtue, a way to think.  As I sat in class listening to a professor talk about Plato’s theory of forms, my roommate, who was a year older and much smarter than me, passed me a note: “Commit it to the flames,” she’d written.  I suppressed a little laugh. Perversely, we both went on to do graduate work in philosophy.

 ***

But the old metaphysics, I thought, put philosophy too close to religion, and seemed to stand in the way of progress in philosophy.  After Hume, philosophy could live in the real world, and not skulk in the shadows. It didn’t have to be pompous and overly intellectual—it could just live in this world, among the common people, appealing to common sense.

Then there was Philosophy and the Loaded Gun by Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes, with these passages:

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes, “Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

Well, the final passage of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Scottish empiricist David Hume makes his targets abundantly clear.   He argues: 

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning containing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (E 12.34)

Hume, as any good modern philosopher must be when making her or his treatise, is the “well-read man” in the sense that his set of arguments on what we should see as true derives from and argues against those of his philosophical forefathers and contemporaries.  

 ***

Beyond these two categories lie speculative metaphysics and dogmatic theology––that is, Hume’s targets.  So, if a wandering reader roaming the stacks with her finger tips lovingly brushing against chalky spines finds, per chance, Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Hume suggests she unnestle it from its snug shelf-spot and find the nearest fireplace.  Not to sit by, imagining herself as Descartes watching his wax melting and contemplating the nature of its extension, changability, and movability, but to commit to the blaring warmth of the flames and watch it decompose into violent ash.  The same goes for the Bible, or any other theological text.  Because those works espouse “nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

 Too tired to finish the job of clearing out my email. Good night, dear readers.

I spent the night with WFMU in the background.

But this will be the song for the day.

sch